John : Thank you again for your prompt answers.
I ran the following and it worked flawlessly :
vips extract_band /tmp/input.tif /tmp/output.tif[bigtiff,tile,tile-width=256,tile-height=256] 0 --n=3
However, the following command hung after the file output.tif was a little over 8GB (which is the file size I was expecting). The only difference is that I was requesting a pyramidal tiff :
vips extract_band /tmp/input.tif /tmp/output.tif[pyramid,bigtiff,tile,tile-width=256,tile-height=256] 0 --n=3
Interestingly, after I killed the vips process, it turned out that the file output.tif had been generated correctly. Not sure why vips did not exit on it's own. If there is a way to generate more debug information to help identify the problem, please let me know and I'll be happy to provide it.
The final solution I am now using is a two step procedure :
vips extract_band /tmp/input.tif /tmp/output.tif[bigtiff,tile,tile-width=256,tile-height=256] 0 --n=3
vips tiffsave /tmp/input.tif /tmp/output.tif --pyramid --tile --tile-width=256 --tile-height=256 --bigtiff
As far as he end result is concerned, the two separate steps are fine and they produce the images in the format I need.
Thank you very much for your help
-Sid